In recent years, work has become increasingly computerized in various areas of business. In an office or similar environment, it has become common practice for employees to carry out tasks with personal computers and for business data to be managed in an integrated manner with a server computer called a file server on an in-house LAN.
Meanwhile, the fact that business data on the server flows through an employee's personal computer, known as a client, has become a social issue. Against this background, various mechanisms for preventing data from leaking from the client have been proposed.
A thin-client method, which is one solution to data leakage, prevents data from leaking from a client by preventing the client from holding data and allowing only a server on a network to hold the data. Specifically, a measure is taken not to give the client authority to write data to its own hard disk drive (HDD) or the like.
As well as the thin-client method, there is a method of assuring security by creating a special region, such as a partition or a file, for storing business data in a client and setting a password to access the region.
With the thin-client method, however, the user of a client cannot access data unless the client is connected to a server over a network. Therefore, for example, a salesperson or the like cannot take out necessary business data and make a presentation using the business data in front of customers, which is inconvenient.
In addition, with a method other than the thin-client method, since the operating system (OS) that accepts a user operation on a client can access the region, the risk of data being stolen illegally by password analysis or the like cannot be eliminated.